


bereave

by Anonymous



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:54:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22798165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Kaede, in the aftermath of her sister's death.
Relationships: InuYasha & Kaede (InuYasha), Kaede & Kikyou (InuYasha)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 9
Collections: Anonymous





	bereave

Three days have passed since Kikyo-oneesama died.

Three days since the funeral pyre quieted to smoldering embers.

Three days since the Shikon Jewel disappeared from this world.

Three days since the life in her bled out through the gashes in her shoulder

Three days. It still hurts.

Kaede is exhausted.

She cannot let it show, of course. With Oneesama gone, the duties of a miko rest firmly upon her narrow shoulders. Injuries must be treated. The shrine must be rebuilt and tended. Herbs must be made into medicine. Youkai must be fought off with sacred arrows. And she is only one with the training—the power—to accomplish this.

Oneesama’s yumi is enormous in her hands. All she can manage is a hankyu, barely half the size of her sister’s great bow. Her empty socket still aches with the memory of her missing eye. Sometimes she will wake in the middle of the night to find blood wetting her bandages.

She’s only ten.

Three days have passed since Kikyo-oneesama’s murderer raged through the village.

The process of rebuilding is slow, so painfully slow. Broken weapons scatter themselves underfoot, splintered arrows and spears snapped by clawed hands and the shredded remains of rope nets that proved ineffective against the rampage. Charred debris of what were once houses and homes must be hauled away to be replaced with fresh timber. Crop fields have been ruined, deep gouges in the earth. Smoke hangs in the air, a grey and gloomy veil. Ashes linger at the backs of everyone’s throats.

The temple at the top of the hill, once home to this village’s most sacred treasure, is nothing more than a tangle of blackened detritus.

But they persevere. They must. It is the way of humans, to persevere.

(Perhaps, if _he_ had become human, as Kikyo-oneesama wished him to, he would have known that)

While Kaede doles out medicine to those who need it—those who were injured by the impact of falling debris or burned from raging flames or breathed in great lungfuls of black smoke—those with able-bodies work to repair their homes. Destroyed buildings are torn down. The skeletons of new huts are erected, hollow but defiant. What little can be salvaged from the fields is, though the loss is still devastating and winter will be hard when it comes. Broken things are cleared from the ground.

It is brutal and bitter work. Kaede does what she can, where she can. But what she can do is so little, with her aching eye and her small hands smelling of herbs and her heart still heavy with grief.

This isn’t fair. Why did Oneesama have to die?

(When Kaede allows herself to be bitter, to be childish and weak and less than what her sister wanted her to be, she thinks that _he_ got what he deserved)

On the third day, Kaede runs out of medicine.

Most of Oneesama’s stores were emptied when that youkai swarm nearly razed the village to the ground (ironically, it was _him_ that helped defend them, then). Poultices were still sticky on the underside of bandages when _he_ came and nearly tore up the town. They weren’t expecting the attack—no one was. Their guards had gone lax after almost an entire year of _his_ presence lingering in their periphery, just long enough for people to grow used to the idea and the discomfort to fade. They did not suspect he might turn on them, as suddenly and brutally as he did.

What little is left has to be distributed sparingly, hesitantly, because there are times when Kaede finds herself pausing as she tries to remember what herbs are used for what, or where this plant can be found. Every day, it seems like her sister’s voice grows more distant, more empty, an echo fading in the back of a dark cave.

(If only she had paid more attention when she had the chance)

A few kind women, those who have sympathy (pity) for Kaede because of her age and her own aching injury, assist her in mixing the herbs and crushing poultices and dressing the wounds as best as their untrained hands can. They listen to her, let her order them around, pretend that she has authority over them. And for a little while, she can almost convince herself that she has what it takes to follow in her sister’s footsteps.

Almost.

But the medicine runs out all the same. And Kaede swallows the ashes at the back of her throat as she realizes she will have to venture into the forest to collect more.

The forest. Where _he_ sleeps.

Kaede has the utmost faith in her sister’s seal, but she still throws a quiver over her shoulder and grips her hankyu with white knuckles.

It is a matter of principle, more than anything. If she is going to face _him_ , then she is going to do so as Kikyo-oneesama’s successor. She is going to do it as the miko her sister wanted her to be, rather than the scared and angry child she desperately wants to be instead. As she steps outside her hut—one of the few buildings that remains in-tact in the aftermath—she bids her temporary helpers to not leave the village until she returns.

“I’ll be back soon,” she promises, and tries not to think about the fact that Oneesama said the very same thing when she left at dawn’s first light—only to return with her life staining crimson-dark the shoulder of her haori.

Once upon a time, the forest had been something sacred to Kaede. It was the place where Oneesama first taught her how to draw back her diminutive bow and fire her arrows in defense of good people. The place where Oneesama pointed out each herb that could be used for medical purposes, warding off infections or curing poisoning or numbing pain. The place where Oneesama sent her to practice her budding spiritual power so that, one day, they could stand together as protectors of the weak.

It is the place where _he_ raised his claws in defense of Kaede’s life. The place where she first began to think that, perhaps, _he_ was not wicked after all.

Now it is the place where _he_ is sealed by Kikyo-oneesama’s arrow.

Kaede brushes away a low-hanging branch before it can catch on her bandages. There is a coolness in the dappled shadow of the canopy that she, even now, cannot help but find pleasant. Ferns brush her ankles as though in greeting of an old friend. It is almost easy to forget the time _he_ crouched before her, amber eyes (deceptively) earnest, brows drawn in (false) concern.

She can see it. The Goshinboku, its branches proud and booming in the distance. Towering over everything else, obtuse and uncompromising. A constant above the chaos.

Her feet carry her there before she can stop them.

It is her first time seeing that Oneesama’s arrow reduced _him_ to.

Back then, all she caught was a fleeting glimpse of _him_ , a flicker at the edges of her periphery. The blood cooling on her sister’s body, after all, was infinitely more urgent than her murderer’s fate. And then, when Oneesama collapsed, their attention turned towards funerary rights, towards cremating her remains, towards fulfilling her final wishes.

Now, Kaede stands in the shadow of the tree. The shadow of the beast her sister vanquished.

 _He_ is a shock against the greenery, an incongruous thing that does not belong. Sunlight glints off the claws that tip his fingers. His limp hair is ghostly pale, like a sun-bleached bone. His clothes are the color of carnage.

(Somehow that is perfectly fitting, for something that caused so much pain and destruction)

If you ignore the arrow jutting out from between his ribs, he almost looks... peaceful. Not quite content—that’s too much of a stretch, for someone who was cut down so abruptly and violently—but there is a slackened sort of acceptance in his features. A surrender in the way he slumps against the bark. Relief in how his head dips to one side, as though welcoming the opportunity to rest at long last. If not for the stillness that clings to him so unsettlingly, anyone who didn’t know better would say he was simply sleeping, the world dead to him for the tantalizing dreams behind his eyelids.

A picture of death, painted in slow and loving brushstrokes.

Errant bitterness clutches at her. It’s not _fair_. Kikyo-oneesama died bloodily, quivering in agony. So why does _he_ get to look so peaceful?

There was a time, once, when she might have actually had something of a crush on _him_.

A stupid thing—silly and infantile and certainly not befitting the miko that her sister wished her to be. But Kaede was (is) only ten, and when _he_ shredded the creature that would have taken her life in defense of her, something like admiration bloomed guilelessly in her breast. _He_ struck her as dashing, in a rough and uncouth way. And it was no wonder to her why her sister became so very taken with _him_.

That is not to say she ever felt jealousy, or resentment, against her sister for the relationship that bloomed between them. Far from it. She saw the change in her sister, and she delighted in it. The warmth that stuttered to life beneath that cold and stoic visage, the phantoms of smiles that slipped free in idle moments, the contemplative moments when those eyes gleamed brighter than they used to.

It was so very rare that Oneesama expressed something like joy. But _he_ sparked it in her, this new and beautiful and absolutely marvelous thing that glowed in her from the inside out.

In the back of her mind, Kaede can still hear her furtive whisper that night, her chestnut eyes shining with a hopefulness that she’d never seen before, as her sister murmured into the hush of darkness that _he’s has changed his mind, Kaede—he’s changed his mind and he’s going to become human and we will be together_.

Kaede looks at _him_ now—and wishes she had the freedom to despise him until her soul turns black from it.

But she doesn’t. She simply snorts, turning away.

There are herbs to collect.

While she’s out there, dirtying her fingers and staining her nails green, she reluctantly ventures to Onigumo’s cave. Peers into the dark mouth of it, down into the black belly of the beast, calls softly for the vile man her sister advised her to pity instead of despise.

Instead of a figure dressed head-to-toe in soiled bandages, only a scorched floor greets her. Stone walls streaked black with evidence of a fire. No trace of the sheet that her sister laid down on the barren floor. A tipped lantern that once illuminated the darkness. Something foul in the air, a lingering presence thick as tar, aching to breathe in. Kaede gags on it, nausea churning to life deep in her belly

(She remembers how Oneesama’s body smelled when the flames ate her alive.)

When she comes back into herself, she’s stumbling around in the field, gasping so hard her lungs ache from it. Her eye burns like the funeral pyre did. Ashes sting at the back of her throat. Bile chokes her.

With shaky fingers, she touches her bandaged eye and is unsurprised to find it weeping blood again.

It still hurts.

Shameful and wretched as it is to admit, Kaede finds herself relieved, of all things. It is a terrible thing to feel. A terrible, ugly thing that no miko should feel. She is instantly ashamed of it, casting her eye to the ground, sniffling in a way that is completely undignified, and tries desperately to cage all that awfulness into a dark corner of her mind where it will never see the light of day.

She is relieved because—this way, she will only have to deal with one awful bastard. Only one vile man who makes her blood boil and her skin itch and her jaw grind so hard her teeth start to ache.

And if she had to choose, she would rather take the one who killed her sister.

She’s only ten.

Despite her best efforts, Kaede is drawn back to the tree. To the shadow of its ancient branches, the surreal coil of its roots into the earth. To _him_.

Of course she is. She will never escape _him_ —no more than she can shrug off the duty that now rests firmly on her narrow shoulders. Forever, _he_ will be a scorch mark upon her being, a necrotic and oozing brand upon her soul. The source of a jagged pressure that leans insistent upon her mind, bitter and ugly and unbecoming of a miko. She cannot hate him, but oh how she _wishes_ she could.

Her eye rakes over _him_ , critical and unforgiving. His ethereal white hair. His canine ears. His tanned, sundrenched face. His garish clothes. His bloodied claws—

His _un_ bloodied claws.

Three days have passed since Kikyo-oneesama died. There has been no rainfall in the interim. And it does not make sense to wash away the evidence of the crime before spreading even more pain and destruction. Those claws should be brown-black with guilt, with old blood dried and flaking.

They are clean.

The entire world turns on its head.

“She said it was _you_.”

Her hoarse, rasping whisper earns no response. Because of course it doesn’t. Kaede has the utmost faith in her sister’s seal. Guilt or innocence, it will remain for all eternity. It will not falter, or waver, or crumble. It will survive long after Kaede has crumbled into dust and joined in death the only person who was her family, her mentor, her entire damn _world_.

“How could it not be _you_?! If it w-wasn’t _you_ , then—”

Pain in her lungs. Pressure behind her eyes. A storm between her ribs. Thunderclaps breaking in her throat. Rain leaking down her face. She wants to split apart.

“If it wasn’t _you_... t-then _who killed my sister_?!”

Desperation echoes in the silence. Kaede collapses to the ground, hysterical sobs spilling free from the dark place where she caged them away. She has become the scared and angry child she cannot afford to be, but she does not know how to be anything else.

“...why did she have to die?”

Inuyasha sleeps, and does not answer.

When her fit has calmed, Kaede gathers up the herbs that she dropped back into her arms, wipes her stinging eye and running nose with her knuckles, and trots back to the village.

There is no time for such bouts of pointless immaturity. With Oneesama gone, the duties of a miko rest firmly upon her narrow shoulders. Injuries must be treated. The shrine must be rebuilt and tended. Herbs must be made into medicine. Youkai must be fought off with sacred arrows. And she is only one with the training—the power—to accomplish this.

The villagers breathe a collective sigh of relief when she returns. It would be a tragedy for them to have lost another miko.

They need her.

She’s only ten.


End file.
